You are bidding on a set of 3 paperback books.

These include:

Night Gate: The Gateway Trilogy, Book One

by Isobelle Carmody

Gr. 5-8. "A girl, four dogs, and a goat walk through an enchanted gateway" may sound like the beginning of a joke, but in the case of Carmody's latest fantasy, the first book in the Gateway Trilogy, it's simply descriptive. Rage, a girl of perhaps 12, is forbidden by thoughtless guardians to visit her comatose mother in the hospital. She disobeys, but en route she and five animal companions stumble through a portal to another world. The gate's magic changes the beasts into talking, thinking almost-humans, who help Rage to complete a deal brokered by an elusive messenger: restore magic to the withering world of Valley and receive healing for Mother in return. The plot may be conventional, but Carmody's writing is satisfyingly brocaded (light in a forest is "like cables of radiance anchored to the ground"), and her elaborate world building will impress genre fans. But it's the real-world issues informing Rage's choices, and the varying degrees to which the animals embrace or reject their human natures, that seam their journey with rich psychological relevance. 

Keeper

by Mal Peet

Gr. 9-12. Published originally in the United Kingdom, this unusual novel won the 2004 Branford Boase Award and was short-listed for the Nestle Children's Book Prize. Framed as an interview between a South American sports reporter and the world's best soccer goalkeeper, the now 30-year-old "El Gato" relates how he developed his skills, achieved great fame, and won the coveted World Cup. His story is one of poverty and isolation in a small logging community, of strong family ties in a beloved jungle being inexorably denuded, and of intense focus on the game of soccer. If a coming-of-age tale meeting an environmental message framed by sports narrative weren't enough, a mystical element is added, as El Gato describes his rigorous soccer training by a ghost in a magical clearing hewn from dense foliage. El Gato's remembrances do not consistently take the reader with him, and disparate elements don't always gel. Rich depictions of family and forest are marred by stilted, implausible dialogue and choppy transitions between present and past. With its lengthy descriptions of the game, this may appeal most to soccer fans.

The Book Thief 

by Markus Zusak

Grade 9-Adult. Zusak has created a work that deserves the attention of sophisticated teen and adult readers. Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep when she's roused by regular nightmares about her younger brother's death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayor's reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesel's story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves. An extraordinary narrative.